The Relay Fanfare

In the autumn of 1996, I lived with my sister Dana in a cramped top-floor apartment in a converted Victorian on the edge of Harlow, a college town that still had one foot in the country. We’d moved there for our master’s programs—I was studying folklore, Dana was in biochemistry—and we’d chosen the place for its cheap rent and the promise of a short walk to campus. The building was a peeling, three-story structure with a sagging porch and a landlord who only showed up to collect rent. Our unit, the west attic, had a slanted ceiling in the living room, a tiny kitchen that smelled of old grease, and a narrow hallway leading to a shared bathroom between our two bedrooms. The bathroom door had a lock that never quite caught, and the floorboards creaked in a pattern I soon memorized.

Our street, Maple Avenue, was normally quiet, but one Saturday in July, the Olympic Torch Relay was scheduled to pass through Harlow. The route took the torch right down our block, and Dana and I, eager for a bit of excitement, planned to watch from our living room window, which had a perfect view of the street below. The morning of the relay, the air was thick with humidity, and the sound of distant brass bands drifted up. We’d opened all the windows to let in any breeze, but the heat clung to the walls, and the old radiator in the corner gave off a phantom warmth even in summer.

As the crowd began to gather, a strange pressure seemed to build in the apartment. I noticed it first when I tried to pour a glass of water from the tap: the stream sputtered and then ran clear, but for a second, it had been tinged with a reddish-brown. I shrugged it off as rusty pipes. Then, as the relay’s vanguard arrived—police cars with flashing lights, a convoy of sponsors’ vans—the floorboards under the window began to vibrate in a rhythmic thrum, like a low cello note. Dana felt it too; she put her palm flat on the floor and looked up with a frown. ‘Is it the excitement?’ she asked. I didn’t answer, because at that moment, the music swelled, and I heard something else underneath it: a faint, discordant melody from within our walls.

The relay procession was a blur of color and noise. The torchbearer, a young woman in a white tracksuit, ran past with the flame held high, and the crowd cheered. Dana laughed and snapped a photo with our old Polaroid, leaning out the window. But when she pulled the photo from the camera and watched it develop, her face went pale. She handed it to me without a word. In the image, the street was there, the crowd, the police car, but the torchbearer was missing. In her place was a figure in what looked like an old-fashioned running outfit—a dark, shapeless form with no discernible face, just a smudge of black where its head should be. And in the background, visible through the crowd, was our building, and in the attic window, a silhouette that wasn’t us.

We tried to dismiss it as a trick of light, a shadow. But as the crowd dispersed and the street grew quiet, the melody from the walls grew louder. It was a jaunty tune, like a circus calliope, but off-key and jangling, as if played on warped instruments. I traced the sound to the hallway wall that separated us from the other third-floor apartment—next door was vacant, the landlord had told us, the previous tenants had moved out months ago. The wall was solid plaster, and yet the music seemed to emanate from within it. I pressed my ear to the peeling wallpaper, but the sound stopped instantly. Then, from the other side, came a soft knock. Three taps. I froze. Dana was in the living room, and I called out to her. When she came, she heard it too: three taps, slow and deliberate, from the empty apartment next door.

That night, we decided to investigate. The other apartment’s door was locked, but the lock was old and we found a credit card in Dana’s wallet that could jiggle it open. The door swung in with a creak, revealing a dark, musty space identical to ours but reversed. It was empty, except for a few dust bunnies and a single item in the center of the living room floor: a brass trumpet, tarnished and dented, with a torn blue ribbon tied around its bell. The ribbon had a small tag, and when I picked it up, I read the faded words: ‘Harlow Relay Fanfare, 1912.’ The trumpet was warm to the touch, as if someone had just played it. Dana reached for it, but I stopped her. ‘Don’t touch it,’ I said. But the melody in the walls resumed, and this time, it was unmistakable: it was the same jaunty tune, but played on the trumpet, and it seemed to be coming from the bell itself, even though nobody was holding it.

We retreated to our apartment and tried to sleep, but the music followed us. It was softer in our bedroom, but when I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of a procession on a dirt road, a trumpet player in old-fashioned clothes, and a crowd of people with distorted faces. I woke in the morning to find Dana standing at the window, staring out. She hadn’t slept. She turned to me and said, ‘I think we have to get rid of it.’

We tried to throw the trumpet away. We took it to a dumpster three blocks away and tossed it in. But when we returned, it was sitting on our doorstep, the blue ribbon neatly retied. We tried burying it in a vacant lot, but it reappeared on our kitchen table, with a small note in an elegant script: ‘Don’t forget the relay.’ The melody now was constant, a loop that played in our heads even when the walls were silent. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t sleep. The Polaroid photos we took of the apartment began to show the same ghostly figure in various corners—in the hallway, in the bathroom, always at the edge of the frame, its face a black void.

The relay was over, but the torch’s flame seemed to have left a scar on our building. On the third night, I woke to the sound of a crowd cheering outside. I stumbled to the window and saw the street below filled with people in old-fashioned clothes—men in bowler hats, women in long dresses—all watching a parade that wasn’t there. And in the middle of it, leading the procession, was the trumpet player. He had no face, just a blank oval, but he raised the trumpet to his lips and played the jaunty tune, and I felt the floor begin to shake. Dana appeared beside me, gripping my arm. ‘He wants us to join,’ she whispered.

The figure looked up at our window, directly at us, and I felt the pull, a terrible Vant to climb out and join the parade. But at the last second, Dana grabbed the Polaroid camera and snapped a picture. The flash illuminated the scene, and for a split second, I saw the crowd’s faces—they were hollow, like masks, and they were all screaming silently. The photo printed, and as it developed, the image showed not the street, but our living room, empty and normal. And in the photo, we could see a shadowy figure in the corner, but it was smaller, like a child. And it wasn’t the trumpet player. It was a young boy, dressed in clothes from a bygone era, and he was holding the trumpet, but it was too big for him. He seemed to be crying.

As if the photo broke a spell, the outside crowd vanished. The street was empty and quiet. The melody stopped, and the trumpet on the table was suddenly cold. We left the apartment that morning and never went back. We moved in with a friend from campus for the rest of the semester, and we both graduated and moved away. I still have the photos from that day—the ones of the relay, the ones of the ghost—and the one of the boy. They’re in a shoebox in my closet, and I haven’t opened it in years. But sometimes, at night, I think I hear that jaunty tune, and I remember the tag on the trumpet: ‘1912.’ The relay passed through here eighty-four years before, and I wonder if the boy was the original trumpet player, and why he’s still waiting for the parade to end.